Academy Awards 2016

Oscar Nominations 2016: Complete List Of Nominees

(By Stephanie Merry, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 January 2016)

The Oscars ceremony will take place on Feb. 28 and will be broadcast live at 7 p.m. on ABC.

Nominations (by movie):
The Revenant – 12
Mad Max: Fury Road – 10
The Martian – 7
Spotlight – 6
Bridge of Spies – 6
Carol – 6
The Big Short – 5
Star Wars: The Force Awakens – 5

The List Of Nominations For The 88th Academy Awards

Best Picture
Spotlight
The Big Short
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Room

Immediate reaction: The Academy can nominate up to 10 contenders, which leaves space for some less typical entries. This year, it went with eight options, which means we have the movies we knew we’d see — “The Revenant,” “The Martian,” “Spotlight” — but also some less weighty entries, such as “The Big Short” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The one glaring omission (sorry, “Star Wars” fans, it’s not “The Force Awakens”) is “Carol,” which seemed custom-made for awards glory.

Content from JPMorgan Chase & Co. In Context quotes are content from JPMorgan Chase & Co. They all share a common goal of creating their own success, while making their communities better places to live and work.   More  Actor In A Leading Role
Bryan Cranston, Trumbo
Matt Damon, The Martian Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl

Immediate reaction: The only name on this list that really matters is Leonardo DiCaprio. Barring some unthinkable fraud (What if he secretly shot the whole movie on a soundstage? Maybe that bison liver was a strawberry jam-covered mushroom?), he has this category locked down.

Actress In A Leading Role
Cate Blanchett, Carol Brie Larson, Room Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

Immediate reaction: This shakes out a lot like we would have guessed. Golden Globe winner Larson, arguably the front-runner, is on the list, alongside other sure bets, such as Blanchett and Lawrence. The one mild surprise is Rampling, who was phenomenal in “45 Years” but didn’t get a Golden Globe nomination.

Best Director
Lenny Abrahamson, Room
Alejandro Iñárritu, The Revenant George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road
Tom McCarthy, Spotlight
Adam McKay, The Big Short

Immediate reaction: These directors really run the gamut, from Iñárritu and his extreme sport of directing to the staid yet thrilling approach that McCarthy took to “Spotlight.” The most surprising omission is Ridley Scott. The “Martian” director has been nominated multiple times but never won, so this year seemed like the time for the Academy to honor him with a body-of-work Oscar. Instead, Abrahamson and McKay landed on the list, leaving less serious competition for Iñárritu, who has a good shot at winning his second consecutive trophy after last year’s “Birdman.”

Actor In A Supporting Role
Christian Bale, The Big Short
Tom Hardy, The Revenant
Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight
Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies Sylvester Stallone, Creed

Immediate reaction: This is a strong category with a lot of worthy contenders. Globe winner Stallone has been gaining steam coming into awards season with his emotional return to the character of Rocky Balboa. The biggest surprise of the lot is Tom Hardy; apparently the Academy really liked “The Revenant.” He took the place of some other strong candidates, including Idris Elba from “Beasts of No Nation,” Paul Dano in “Love & Mercy” and Michael Shannon for “99 Homes.”

Actress In A Supporting Role
Rooney Mara, Carol
Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight
Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs
Rachel McAdams, Spotlight

Immediate reaction: Vikander burst onto the scene this year with a handful of brilliant performances in buzzy movies, and it’s paying off with a nomination here. It wasn’t clear whether she would land on the list for “Ex-Machina” or “The Danish Girl.” It ended up being the latter, which is interesting considering that the role could have easily been seen as a leading performance. The same goes for Rooney Mara, who probably had more screentime than her co-star Cate Blanchett in “Carol” but ended up in the supporting category. But two skilled vets who seemed to be likely nominees — Oscar winners Helen Mirren and Jane Fonda — didn’t make the cut.

Best Animated Feature Film
Anomalisa
Boy and the World Inside Out
Shaun the Sheep Movie
When Marnie Was There

Immediate reaction: Pixar had two feature films this year, so the assumption was that the studio would end up with two Oscar nominations. That didn’t happen. Awards front-runner “Inside Out” nabbed a nod, but the studio’s slightly less fawned-over “The Good Dinosaur” did not. Instead, the little known “Boy & the World” snuck in. Meanwhile, Charlie Kaufman’s existential puppet show, “Anomalisa,” also got some love.

Best Foreign Language Film
Embrace of the Serpent
Mustang Son of Saul
Theeb
A War

Immediate reaction: The Hungarian film “Son of Saul” is the picture to beat here. The gut punch of a movie also won the Golden Globe for its depiction of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz — a Jewish man who was both a prisoner and a worker, tasked with burning the dead.

Best Adapted Screenplay
The Big Short, Charles Randolph and Adam McKay
Brooklyn, Nick Hornby
Carol, Phyllis Nagy
The Martian, Drew Goddard
Room, Emma Donoghue

Immediate reaction: Aaron Sorkin took home the Golden Globe for “Steve Jobs” on Sunday, but apparently the Academy wasn’t digging his “impressionistic” take on the Apple founder’s life. Instead, we have a couple of movies that managed to make very complicated subjects palatable for a broad audience: Charles Randolph and Adam McKay used a bathing Margot Robbie to explain the financial crisis in “The Big Short” and Drew Goddard made science a lot less confusing in “The Martian.”

Best Original Screenplay
Spotlight, written by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy
Bridge of Spies, written by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
Ex Machina, written by Alex Garland
Inside Out, screenplay by Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley; original story by Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen
Straight Outta Compton, screenplay by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff; story by S. Leigh Savidge and Alan Wenkus and Andrea Berloff

Immediate reaction: This is an eclectic category. We get one animated entry alongside the science fiction of “Ex Machina” and the true story of “Spotlight.” Meanwhile, this is the only nomination for the thrilling N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton.”

Best Original Score
Bridge of Spies, Thomas Newman
Carol, Carter Burwell The Hateful Eight, Ennio Morricone
Sicario, Jóhann Jóhannsson
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, John Williams

Immediate reaction: If legendary composer Ennio Morricone wins the Oscar for “The Hateful Eight” like he won the Golden Globe, he may want to find someone else to accept the award on his behalf, because Quentin Tarantino can’t seem to escape controversy even when it’s in the service of a friend. Meanwhile, Jóhann Jóhannsson gets his second nomination in as many years and — hey look! — “Star Wars” got some love.

Best Cinematography
Carol, Ed Lachman
The Hateful Eight, Robert Richardson
Mad Max: Fury Road, John Seale The Revenant, Emmanuel Lubezki
Sicario, Roger Deakins

Immediate reaction: Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki gets his eighth nomination since 1996 for his work on “The Revenant,” a difficult movie to shoot even before you take into account that Lubezki used only natural light. He’s also won the last two consecutive years, for “Gravity” and “Birdman.” You know who else has been nominated a lot? “Sicario” cinematographer Roger Deakins. This is his 13th nomination and, get this: He’s never won. We’d like to believe that the 13th time is the charm since Deakins’s work on “Sicario” is breath-taking. If only Lubezki’s superhuman undertaking on “The Revenant” weren’t so hard to beat…

Best Production Design
Bridge of Spies, Production Design: Adam Stockhausen; Set Decoration: Rena DeAngelo and Bernhard Henrich
The Danish Girl, Production Design: Eve Stewart ; Set Decoration: Michael Standish Mad Max: Fury Road, Production Design: Colin Gibson; Set Decoration:  Lisa Thompson
The Martian, Production Design: Arthur Max ;Set Decoration: Celia Bobak
The Revenant, Production Design: Jack Fisk; Set Decoration: Hamish Purdy

Immediate reaction: A lot of worthy candidates here. “Mad Max” and “The Martian” certainly utilize some flashy design to create memorable cinematic worlds, but there are also some designers who did more with less, as with “Bridge of Spies.”

Best Visual Effects
Ex Machina, Andrew Whitehurst, Paul Norris, Mark Ardington and Sara Bennett
Mad Max: Fury Road, Andrew Jackson, Tom Wood, Dan Oliver and Andy Williams
The Martian, Richard Stammers, Anders Langlands, Chris Lawrence and Steven Warner
The Revenant, Rich McBride, Matthew Shumway, Jason Smith and Cameron Waldbauer Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, Neal Scanlan and Chris Corbould

Immediate reaction: This is the category that allows massive blockbusters to get some Academy love, and this year that meant “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” made the cut. Interestingly, the bear attack in “The Revenant” was given precedence over Indominus Rex’s fight to the death with a shark-eating dino in “Jurassic World.”

Best Original Song
Earned It, Fifty Shades of Grey, Music & Lyric by Abel Tesfaye, Ahmad Balshe, Jason Quenneville & S. Moccio
Manta Ray, Racing Extinction, Music by J. Ralph; Lyric by Antony Hegarty
Simple Song 3, Youth, Music and Lyric by David Lang Til it Happens to You, The Hunting Ground, Music and Lyric by Diane Warren and Lady Gaga
Writing’s on the Wall, Spectre, Music and Lyric by Jimmy Napes and Sam Smith

Immediate reaction: This is an eclectic year, with a couple Top 40 contenders — “Writing’s On the Wall” and “Earned It” — going up against the classical “Simple Song 3” and the virtually unknown “Manta Ray” (which, as it turns out, is quite beautiful). Speaking of popular songs, there was no room for “See You Again,” the track that really got the waterworks flowing at the end of “Furious 7.”

Best Documentary Feature
Amy
Cartel Land
The Look of Silence
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom

Immediate reaction: British director Asif Kapadia gets his first nomination for his stirring look at the life and death of singer Amy Winehouse. That movie will duke it out with “The Look of Silence,” Joshua Oppenheimer’s gorgeous, heart-breaking companion piece to “The Act of Killing,” another documentary about Indonesian death squads that was Oscar nominated in 2014. Meanwhile, prolific documentarian Alex Gibney didn’t make the cut for his Scientology expose “Going Clear.”

Best Costume Design
Carol, Sandy Powell
Cinderella, Sandy Powell
The Danish Girl, Paco Delgado
Mad Max: Fury Road, Jenny Beavan
The Revenant, Jacqueline West

Immediate reaction: Three-time Oscar winner Sandy Powell is cleaning up this year with two nominations: one for her sumptuous 1950s suits and dresses for “Carol” and the other for her fantastical designs for “Cinderella.” On the other end of the spectrum, the Academy gave some love to “The Revenant” (moccasins, bearskin capes) and the dusty, post-apocalyptic leisurewear of “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Best Makeup And Hairstyling
Mad Max: Fury Road, Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega and Damian Martin
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared, Love Larson and Eva von Bahr The Revenant, Siân Grigg, Duncan Jarman and Robert Pandini

Immediate reaction: It’s going to be hard to compete with the makeup that made Leonardo DiCaprio look like the victim of a gruesome bear attack. It’s interesting that the bombastically titled foreign film “The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared” made the cut above “Black Mass.” Apparently we weren’t the only ones who found the prosthetics in that movie distracting.

Best Live Action Short Film
Ave Maria Day One
Everything Will Be Okay
Shok
Stutterer

Best Animated Short Film
Bear Story
Prologue
Sanjay’s Super Team
We Can’t Live Without Cosmos World of Tomorrow

Best Documentary Short Subject
Body Team 12
Chau, beyond the Lines Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah
A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness
Lasy Day of Freedom

Best Film Editing
The Big Short, Hank Corwin Mad Max: Fury Road, Margaret Sixel
The Revenant, Stephen Mirrione
Spotlight, Tom McArdle
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey

Best Sound Mixing
Bridge of Spies, Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Drew Kunin
Mad Max: Fury Road, Chris Jenkins, Gregg Rudloff and Ben Osmo The Martian, Paul Massey, Mark Taylor and Mac Ruth
The Revenant, Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montaño, Randy Thom and Chris Duesterdiek
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Andy Nelson, Christopher Scarabosio and Stuart Wilson

Best Sound Editing
Mad Max: Fury Road, Mark Mangini and David White
The Martian, Oliver Tarney
The Revenant, Martin Hernandez and Lon Bender
Sicario, Alan Robert Murray
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Matthew Wood and David Acord

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Oscar Nominations: Shocking Stats And Fun Facts (Analysis)

(By Scott Feinberg, Hollywood Reporter, 14 January 2016)

What a morning. The 88th Oscar nominations were announced on Thursday at the Beverly Hills headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Revenant landed a field-leading 12 noms, followed close behind by Mad Max: Fury Road, with 10. The other headlines?  In: The Big Short's director Adam McKay; Room's director Lenny Abrahamson; Joy's lead actress Jennifer Lawrence; The Revenant's Tom Hardy; The Hateful Eight's supporting actress Jennifer Jason Leigh; both Netflix doc features, What Happened, Miss Simone? and Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom; and "Til It Happens to You," the original song by Lady Gaga and seven-time Oscar bridesmaid Diane Warren.

Out: The Martian's director Ridley Scott; Bridge of Spies' director Steven Spielberg; Straight Outta Compton for best picture; every actor of color, including The Hateful Eight's Samuel L. Jackson, Concussion's Will Smith, Creed's Michael B. Jordan and Beasts of No Nation's Idris Elba; Carol and The Hateful Eight for best picture, meaning no Weinstein Co. film in the best picture category, something almost unheard of in recent decades; Steve Jobs' Aaron Sorkin and The Hateful Eight's Quentin Tarantino in the screenplay categories; and "See You Again," the Paul Walker tribute song from Furious 7.

Today brought the first-ever noms for, among others: Room's Abrahamson, Big Short's director and co-screenwriter McKay, Trumbo's lead actor Bryan Cranston, Room's lead actress Brie Larson, 45 Years' lead actress Charlotte Rampling, The Revenant's supporting actor Hardy, Bridge of Spies' supporting actor Mark Rylance, The Hateful Eight's supporting actress Leigh, Spotlight's supporting actress Rachel McAdams, The Danish Girl's supporting actress Alicia Vikander, Carol's composer Carter Burwell and The Hunting Ground's Gaga.

If any film other than The Big Short or Spotlight wins best picture, it will be the first time in 20 years — since 1995's Braveheart — that the prize went to a film that wasn't nominated for the best ensemble SAG Award.

While the film with the most Oscar noms often wins best picture, The Revenant, which leads the field with 12, will need to defy a lot of history to be this year's winner, as only seven films ever have won without a screenplay nom, including only one in the last 50 years, Titanic (1997). The others: Wings (1927/1928), The Broadway Melody (1928/1929), Grand Hotel (1931/1932), Cavalcade (1932/1933), Hamlet (1948) and The Sound of Music (1965).

Sylvester Stallone's supporting actor nom for his portrayal of Rocky Balboa in Creed, 39 years after his lead actor nom for his portrayal of the same character in Rocky, sets a record for most years between nominations for portrayals of the same character; the record previously belonged to Paul Newman, who received a best actor nom for his portrayal of "Fast Eddie" Felson in The Hustler (1961) and won for his portrayal of the same character 25 years later in The Color of Money (1986). Only four others received multiple noms for playing the same character: Bing Crosby for Father O'Malley, Peter O'Toole for King Henry II, Al Pacino for Michael Corleone and Cate Blanchett for Queen Elizabeth II.  The only characters that have been recognized with more noms than the two now accorded to Rocky Balboa are Queen Elizabeth I and King Henry VIII, each three times.

Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant become only the fourth and fifth films ever to receive noms in all seven technical categories (cinematography, costume design, film editing, production design/art direction, sound editing, sound mixing and visual effects), joining 1997's Titanic, 2003's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and 2011's Hugo.  The best picture nom for The Revenant marks the third year in a row that a film from Arnon Milchan's New Regency, which is run by Brad Weston, is in the running; its 12 Years a Slave and Birdman both won best picture, and a win for The Revenant would mark an unprecedented three-peat. 

With his ninth nom for producing a best picture nominee, Bridge of Spies' Spielberg moves into sole possession of the record for most all-time, passing former collaborator Kathleen Kennedy (Star Wars: The Force Awakens).  This marks the second consecutive nom for The Revenant's director and co-screenwriter Alejandro G. Inarritu, The Danish Girl's lead actor Eddie Redmayne, Spotlight's supporting actor Mark Ruffalo and The Hunting Ground's Warren. (With a win for directing, Inarritu would tie a record currently held by John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for most consecutive wins in that category, two. Redmayne, with a win for best actor, would tie the record currently held by Spencer Tracy and Tom Hanks for most consecutive best actor wins, two.)  Joy's lead actress Jennifer Lawrence, 25, sets a new record as the youngest person ever to land four acting nominations.

This marks the third consecutive nom for The Revenant's cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. (With a win for cinematography, he would establish a new record for most consecutive wins in that category, three, breaking the record he currently shares with Leon Shamroy, Winton Hoch and John Toll, who all won two.)  Several perennial bridesmaids — The Hunting Ground's Warren (this is her eighth nomination), Sicario's cinematographer Roger Deakins (his 13th, extending his record for most among living lensers) and Bridge of Spies' composer Thomas Newman (his 13th) — have another shot at gold.

Several people received multiple noms today: The Big Short's McKay, for best director and best adapted screenplay; Spotlight's McCarthy, for best director and best original screenplay; Sandy Powell, nominated for best costume design for both Carol and Cinderella; and Andy Nelson, nominated for best sound editing for both Bridge of Spies and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens' composer John Williams extends his record for most Oscar noms for a living person from 49 to 50.

Racing Extinction's original song "Manta Ray" becomes only the 22nd nomination for a documentary outside of the documentary categories, and only the sixth for a song. (It's J. Ralph's second, after "Before My Time" from 2012's Chasing Ice.)  The Hateful Eight's Ennio Morricone, 87, sets a new record for oldest nominee for the best original score award.  With its best foreign-language film nom for Mustang, France extends its record for most noms in that category from 39 to 40; it has won the category 12 times, second only to Italy (14).

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Oscar Nominations: Now It's a Whole New Race (Analysis)

(By Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter, January 14, 2016)

It's fun to try to find clues about the Academy Awards race in the SAG and Critics' Choice noms or the results of the AFI and Golden Globe awards or all of the other tea leaves throughout the season, but nothing offers a better indication of how the Academy feels about a crop of movies than the Oscar noms themselves. So what do this year's reveal?

The best picture race is likely between Spotlight and The Big Short, with The Revenant as possible spoiler. True, The Revenant leads the field with 12 noms, and Mad Max: Fury Road is close behind with 10. But the former films — which have six and five noms, respectively — showed up in important categories in which the latter films didn't.

All four are represented in the best director and best film editing races, without which films rarely win best picture. However, Mad Max is not nominated for an acting award, while Spotlight and Revenant each are up for two and The Big Short is up for one (the actors branch is by far the Academy's largest branch); moreover, The Big Short and Spotlight, but not the other two, are nominated for the best ensemble SAG Award, which has proven to be a key indicator for how the Academy behaves — indeed, if any other best pic nominee wins, it will be the first time in 20 years, since 1995's Braveheart, that the prize went to a film that wasn't even nominated for the best ensemble SAG Award. Additionally, The Revenant and Mad Max did not receive screenplay noms, without which only seven films in 87 years, and only one in the last 50, Titanic, has prevailed in the top category.  What chance do any of the other best picture nominees stand? Slim to none.

Room, which has campaigned aggressively thus far, could prove a wild card: It landed only three other noms, but they came in the directing, acting and screenwriting categories, which are obviously major ones.

The Martian, which was snubbed by SAG, probably was critically wounded today by the shocking omission of its director, Ridley Scott. While it still bagged lead actor, adapted screenplay and four below-the-line noms, only four films without a director nom have won best picture.  Similarly, one would have had to regard Bridge of Spies, with its six noms — including acting and screenwriting noms, plus three others in below-the-line categories — as a more serious threat if its director, Steven Spielberg, had landed a nom.

And then there's Brooklyn, which has only two other noms — for acting and screenwriting — but which has, in Fox Searchlight, a distributor that has effectively navigated the Academy before (the last two best picture winners were handled by the company), and which can be expected to play up the timeliness of the film's central subject matter, immigration to America.

As for the other major categories?  Strong sentiment, on top of strong performances, probably will be enough to carry The Revenant's lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Creed's Sylvester Stallone to wins in their respective categories.  DiCaprio is up against The Martian's Matt Damon and The Danish Girl's Eddie Redmayne, who already have statues on their mantelpieces, and Trumbo's Bryan Cranston and Steve Jobs' Michael Fassbender, who probably have to pay their dues a bit more and won't be helped by the otherwise lackluster showing for their films. If Leo starts doing a bit more gabbing and glad-handing — not his favorite things to do — this is his to lose; if he instead opts to sit back and cross his fingers, then the ground could shift beneath him, probably to the benefit of Cranston, an extremely popular guy who is up for his portrayal of a Hollywood hero.

Stallone, though, is less of a sure thing. He's done a lot of schlock over the 39 years since he was last nominated (for the original Rocky), and he's not known as the warmest guy in the world (although he's turned on the charm in recent weeks). Spotlight's Mark Ruffalo is beloved and greatly helped by the absence from this category of any of his other many co-stars who were vying for spots. The Big Short's Christian Bale recently won; Bridge of Spies' Mark Rylance, while a legend in theater circles, still is largely unknown in Hollywood; and The Revenant's Tom Hardy wasn't even expected to be nominated — so they seem like longer shots.

The best actress race just got a lot more interesting. Room's Brie Larson, 26, and Brooklyn's Saoirse Ronan, 21, were expected to duke it out for the win, but the far-from-assured nomination of Joy's Jennifer Lawrence, 25, might further split the support of people who want to champion a young up-and-comer, to the benefit of the revered veteran Charlotte Rampling, 69, a first-time nominee, for 45 Years. It's hard to imagine Carol's Cate Blanchett returning to the podium for a third time so soon after her second, just two years ago.

Perhaps the toughest-to-predict category is best supporting actress. The edge probably goes to The Danish Girl's Alicia Vikander, in part because she's the talented and gorgeous "It" girl of the season (they tend to do well in this category), and in part because she — like Rooney Mara, nominated for Carol — got away with category fraud (the supporting nominee with the most substantial part usually wins). There's a chance that Rachel McAdams, who is very popular, could prevail on the coattails of Spotlight, as no other nominee in this category hails from a best pic contender. The Hateful Eight's Jennifer Jason Leigh is a widely respected and never-before-nominated vet, but she may be hurt by the divisive nature of her film and the fact that The Weinstein Co. also is pushing Mara in this category. And then there's Steve Jobs' Kate Winslet, a past Oscar winner who won the corresponding Golden Globe less than a week ago, but who didn't have to compete at the Globes against Mara or Vikander (at least for The Danish Girl), who were elevated to the lead actress category there.

The screenplay races seem to favor Spotlight (original) and The Big Short (adapted), not least because both are best picture nominees (also the case for adapted nominees Brooklyn, The Martian and Room and original nominee Bridge of Spies) and their directors — Tom McCarthy and Adam McKay, respectively — are among their nominated screenwriters (also the case for Ex Machina and Inside Out, though those registered far fewer noms).

Animated feature will almost certainly go to Inside Out, which would be the 10th Disney and/or Pixar winner in the 15-year history of the category. Its competition includes two stop-motion animated movies — Anomalisa, which has the muscle of Paramount behind it, and Shaun the Sheep, another well-liked film — but only one film animated in that way ever has won: 2005's Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Forget about the two GKIDS nominees, Boy and the World and When Marnie Was There, if only because the fanfare around them isn't remotely comparable to their competitors'.

The doc and foreign races will again be significantly impacted by the decisions, made in recent years, to open up voting for their winners to the entire Academy, rather than just to those who could prove they had actually watched all of the nominees. The result is that many vote without having seen all of the nominees — or sometimes more than just one or two, which inevitably are those about the most widely appealing or controversial topics. That is a major reason why I think the doc Amy, a doc about the life and music of the famous singer Amy Winehouse, and the Hungarian film Son of Saul, a film about the Holocaust, will prevail; Liz Garbus' music doc What Happened, Miss Simone? (one of two Netflix docs to make the final five) and Deniz Gamze Erguven's feminist Mustang, from France — each of those categories' only female-directed nominees — probably are the biggest threats to the frontrunners.

Best original song will almost certainly go to The Hunting Ground's "Til It Happens to You," which has a much higher profile than any of its competitors thanks to the involvement of Lady Gaga, who made a lot of new friends in the Academy with her magnificent tribute to Julie Andrews on last year's Oscars telecast, and Diane Warren, the legendary songwriter who famously has lost on all seven prior occasions on which she was nominated in the category. (The fact that the doc itself was not nominated only further helps the prospects of its song, which, like the doc, deals with sexual assault, a subject that has touched both of its nominees.)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which did not land any major noms, could still do well in the below-the-line categories. It's the favorite for best visual effects, where its competition includes Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant; it's also up against — and might well hold off — those two films for best film editing, best sound editing and best sound mixing; and I wouldn't be at all surprised if John Williams, on his 50th nom, beats The Hateful Eight's Ennio Morricone for best original score.

The Revenant seems like a sure bet for best cinematography, which would mark the third consecutive win for Emmanuel Lubezki (after Gravity and Birdman), which would establish a new record. And Mad Max and The Revenant will duke it out for best makeup and hairstyling, best production design and, perhaps, best costume design — although it's always dangerous to bet against Sandy Powell, who is up for both Carol and Cinderella.

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Omission Of Black Actors Upsetting, But Not Inexplicable Or Proof Of Racism

(By Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 19 January 2016)

Nobody was more disappointed than I was last Thursday morning when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed its 88th Oscar nominations and we learned that Straight Outta Compton had not been nominated for best picture, The Hateful Eight’s Samuel L. Jackson, Creed's Michael B. Jordan and Concussion’s Will Smith had not been nominated for best actor and Beasts of No Nation's Idris Elba had not been nominated for best supporting actor. Each was worthy of recognition.  Many reflexively reacted to the news by accusing the Academy of being a racist organization, and I "get" why: this is the second year in a row in which not one of the five directing nominees or the 20 acting nominees were black (last year's big omissions were Selma's director Ava DuVernay and lead actor David Oyelowo), hence the popular Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite.

But I feel compelled to speak up in defense of the Academy — a stance that Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs (a black woman) will tell you I don't always take — because I believe the root of the problem is less with the Academy than with the film industry as a whole.  Even in 2016, very few people of color direct or star in major American movies. That is the result of decisions made not by the Academy, but by the studios that finance and produce movies — for reasons of commerce and/or bigotry and/or cowardice. This leaves the Academy with a pool of options lacking in diversity, in terms of eligible films and individuals, and in terms of who the Academy can invite to become members (since one must have a considerable body of work to be considered).  Over the last few years, particularly during the administration of Ms. Boone Isaacs, the Academy has made great efforts to address these problems, leaning on studios to be more open-minded in their hiring practices, and leaning on its own branches to make diversity of all sorts — race, gender, age and nationality — a higher priority.

There is always more that the Academy can do. I, for one, think Ms. Boone Isaacs should follow the lead of the late Gregory Peck, the actor who served as the Academy’s president from 1967 through 1970, another period in which the organization was widely criticized for out-of-touch voting. In response, Peck pored over the membership rolls and reclassified people who had not worked for many years as "associate members." Those individuals, most of whom were older and retired and not especially in-tune with the cutting-edge of cinematic or social ideas, retained all of the privileges of membership (free screenings, etc.) except for the right to vote, which he felt — as do I — should be limited to people who are actually involved in the industry. It's time for another round of respectful house-cleaning.

The Baseball Writers' Association of America, the group that votes to determine inductions into the Baseball Hall of Fame, implemented a similar rule in 2015, restricting voting to journalists who had been active in the last 10 years, and they wound up with results that are much more aligned with the way today's baseball lovers feel than the results they had gotten before. Nobody is suggesting that Academy should turn the Oscars into the People's Choice Awards — just that it cannot act as if the status-quo is acceptable.

But back to this year's Oscar noms. The reason this year's #OscarsSoWhite outrage was a bit more muted than last year's is because one can understand better how it happened. None of this year's excluded films about people of color or people of color themselves were thought to be slam-dunks going into the nominations; they were competing in very competitive categories.

Compton is an amazing movie — I included it on my personal year-end top 10 list — but the Academy guarantees only five slots, and can go only as high as 10, and few would argue that any of the eight films that were nominated were less deserving of a nom than Compton was. If the Academy still guaranteed 10 nominees for best pic, as it did back when Casablanca won and briefly again just a few years ago, then Compton would have been nominated. I have no doubt about that.

Jackson, Jordan, Smith and Elba gave incredible performances — all were guests on my 'Awards Chatter' podcast before voting closed — but again, none of the people who were nominated instead of them were indefensible selections. It's a tough pill to swallow, but it was just a terrific year for actors, lead and supporting. Additionally, the distributor of Jordan's film didn't realize it was an awards contender until it was already very late in the game (perhaps too late to mobilize a fully-effective campaign); the distributor of Elba's film released it through a model never before tested with the Academy (in just a few theaters simultaneous to its debut on Netflix, which a lot of fogies still don't have); and the Academy wasn’t crazy about anything to do with Jackson’s or Smith’s films, including the contributions of the white people who wrote and directed them.

The bottom line? I understand being pissed off that one's favorites were not Oscar-nominated — but I genuinely don't believe that racism was the driving reason for any of this year’s exclusions. And, if it's any consolation, Jordan, Smith, Elba and the folks from Compton are in pretty good company: also denied noms that many expected them to get were Sir Ridley Scott (who got bounced by Room's Lenny Abrahamson, a guy most Academy members still haven't heard of), Helen Mirren, Johnny Depp, Quentin Tarantino, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Keaton, Aaron Sorkin and Kristen Stewart.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/oscars-omission-black-actors-upsetting-856743?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=THR%20Awards%20Alerts_now_2016-01-19%2009:34:43_ehayden&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_therace_alerts

David Bowie

David Bowie Dies At 69; Mesmerizing Performer And Restless Innovator

(By Tara Bahrampour, Washington Post, 11 January 2016)

David Bowie, the self-described “tasteful thief” who appropriated from and influenced glam rock, soul, disco, new wave, punk rock and haute couture, and whose edgy, androgynous alter egos invited fans to explore their own dark places, died Jan. 10, two days after his 69th birthday.  The cause was cancer, his family said on official Bowie social media accounts. Relatives also confirmed the news but did not disclose where he died. He had recently been collaborating on an Off Broadway musical, “Lazarus,” a sequel to his starring role in the 1976 film “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” And days earlier, he had released his 25th studio album, “Blackstar,” backed by a small jazz group and featuring songs as boldly experimental as anything else in his long career.

With his sylphlike body, chalk-white skin, jagged teeth and eyes that appeared to be two different colors, Mr. Bowie combined sexual energy with fluid dance moves and a theatrical charisma that mesmerized male and female admirers alike.  Citing influences from Elvis Presley to Andy Warhol — not to mention the singer Edith Piaf and writers William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet — Mr. Bowie was trained in mime and fine arts, and played saxophone, guitar, harmonica and piano. A scavenger of musical and visual styles, he repackaged them in striking new formats that were all his own, in turn lending his dramatic, gender-bending aesthetic to later performers such as Prince and Lady Gaga.

With “a melodic sense that’s just well above anyone else in rock & roll,” the singer Lou Reed once wrote, “David Bowie’s contribution to rock & roll has been wit and sophistication.” His output between 1969 and 1983 made up “one of the longest creative streaks in rock history,” according to Rolling Stone magazine.  By the height of his fame in the early 1980s, Mr. Bowie had enacted his own death repeatedly, in the form of characters and ensembles he would create, inhabit and then discard. “My policy has been that as soon as a system or process works, it’s out of date,” he said in a 1977 interview. “I move on to another area.”  The practice, which extended to friendships and professional partnerships, could be jarring. The Spiders From Mars, his band during his glitter-rock Ziggy Stardust years, learned that they were being fired when Mr. Bowie announced it onstage at the end of a 1973 tour.

To fans as well, Mr. Bowie’s rapid transitions could feel like whiplash. In the space of half a decade he was a curly-haired folk singer; a Lauren Bacall look-alike in an evening gown; a vampiric creature with a red mullet, shaved eyebrows and a skintight, multicolored bodysuit; and a coked-up dandy in a tailored suit, suspenders, fedora and cane.  Some of these looks had alter egos associated with them, such as Ziggy Stardust, a fictional rock star who is ultimately ripped to pieces by his fans, or the Thin White Duke, a spectral, disaffected figure dressed impeccably in cabaret-style evening wear who throws “darts in lovers’ eyes.”

As much curator as inventor, Mr. Bowie lifted melodic motifs from blues, funk and standards and presented them in such a way that many fans had no idea that the catchy “Starman” was a version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or that the melancholy “Life on Mars” was “My Way” in disguise. Other musical borrowings were more obvious, such as the opening bass line of “The Jean Genie,” taken from “I’m a Man,” or the “On Broadway” reference at the end of the title track of the album “Aladdin Sane.”

Stardom gave Mr. Bowie his pick of talent. He hand-selected virtuoso session players to help define each musical phase: Mick Ronson’s guitar solos, Mike Garson’s dissonant piano improv, Carlos Alomar’s funky rhythms, and the techno sounds of guitarists Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp that permeated his work in the late ’70s and set the stage for the European electronica of the 1980s.  Mr. Bowie’s voice was similarly labile — gliding between ragged cackle and haunting croon as he sang about decaying cities and alienated rock stars. Fellow musicians marveled at his ability to seduce a crowd with a look or a gesture.  “He’s the total artist,” said Nicholas Godin of the duo Air. “The look, the voice, the talent to compose, the stage presence. The beauty. Nobody is like that anymore. Everybody is reachable; he was unreachable.”

David Robert Jones was born on Jan. 8, 1947, in Brixton, a working-class south London neighborhood scarred by World War II bomb blasts.  His father, a publicist for a children’s charity, was a failed music hall impresario; his mother was a former waitress. An older half-brother, Terry, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized when Mr. Bowie was a young man. For many years the rock star worried about his own mental health, and the theme of insanity runs through his early songs.  “I used to wonder about my eccentricities, my wanting to explore and put myself in dangerous situations, psychically,” he told Esquire magazine in 1993. “I was scared stiff that I was mad, that the reason I was getting away with it was that I was an artist, so people never knew I was totally bonkers.”

His family moved to the middle-class suburb of Bromley, where young David attended Bromley Technical High School and found a mentor in art teacher Owen Frampton, father of the future pop star Peter. At 14, in a fight with a friend over a girl, David was punched in the eye, resulting in a permanently dilated left pupil that would add to the otherworldly appearance he would later cultivate.  After a few lessons on a plastic saxophone purchased on a payment plan, he began playing in local bands, finding that he liked singing and the female adulation that came with it. To avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees, he renamed himself after the 19th-century American frontiersman and the hunting knife associated with him.

Fascinated by musical theater, Mr. Bowie joined a mime troupe led by the dancer (and, briefly, his lover) Lindsay Kemp, who taught him the extravagant, stylized movements he would later bring into his own stage performances.   Although his first two albums received little notice, in 1969 Mr. Bowie had his first hit single with “Space Oddity,” a song about a disaffected astronaut who decides to remain “sitting in my tin can, far above the world,” rather than return to life on Earth. Released five days before the Apollo 11 launch, it reached No. 5 in Britain.  That year he also met Angela Barnett, with whom he would enter into a 10-year marriage and have a son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born in 1971. A shrewd manager of her husband’s early career, Barnett tolerated his blatant philandering and gave him the spiky-on-top, long-in-the-back haircut that would become his signature look through the early 1970s.

The hairdo — and the accompanying glittery bodysuits, platform boots and face paint — was intended as a statement against the peace-and-love, denim-clad hippie imagery dominating rock culture at the time. Mr. Bowie instead presented fans with cut-and-paste lyrics about the end of the world, and shocked them by dropping to his knees to perform mock fellatio on Ronson’s electric guitar or telling an interviewer he was bisexual (though he would later say that was just an experimental phase).  “We wanted to manufacture a new kind of vocabulary,” Mr. Bowie told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2003. “And so the so-called gender-bending, the picking up of maybe aspects of the avant garde and aspects of, for me personally, of things like the Kabuki theater in Japan and German expressionist movies, and poetry by Baudelaire . . . it was a pudding of new ideas, and we were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders the idea that we were creating the 21st century in 1971.”

His ever-changing, outrageous personae also served to mask the painful shyness and insecurity of his younger years.  “I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs onstage,” he told Musician magazine in 1983. Referring to the various personae, he said: “I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going onstage and being myself. I continued designing characters with their own complete personalities and environments. I put them into interviews with me! Rather than be me — which must be incredibly boring to anyone — I’d take Ziggy in, or Aladdin Sane or the Thin White Duke. It was a very strange thing to do.”

Along with his own music, he promoted the careers of lesser-known musicians such as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Mott the Hoople, whose signature hit, “All the Young Dudes,” was written by Mr. Bowie. In 1974 he moved to Los Angeles, whose hyped-up, drugged-out music scene — the “Fame” and “Fascination” immortalized on his album “Young Americans” — took a toll. Extensive cocaine use made him jittery and paranoid, even as it enabled him to be creatively prolific.  Seeking calm and anonymity, Mr. Bowie spent much of the late 1970s in West Berlin, where in collaboration with Brian Eno he produced three albums that experimented with ambient sound and presaged the synthesizer-heavy music of the 1980s.

Returning to live in New York City, he began expanding his range as an actor. Having starred in the Nicholas Roeg film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” in 1980 he played the lead in a stage production of “The Elephant Man,” for which Variety praised his “charismatic personality . . . suggesting springs of passion beneath the severe physical handicaps of the character.”  In both roles he played sensitive freaks misunderstood by the society around them, a theme that had also permeated much of his music. He also starred in “Just a Gigolo” with Marlene Dietrich (1978), in the Tony Scott vampire film “The Hunger” with Catherine Deneuve (1983) and as a rebellious prisoner of war in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (also 1983).

Mr. Bowie’s commercial musical pinnacle also came in 1983, with the blockbuster album “Let’s Dance.” It blasted him into international superstardom, though critics complained that it lacked the depth of his earlier work. Its unexpected success threw Mr. Bowie into a creative tailspin. Having planned to follow it with more esoteric material, he instead tried to duplicate the “Let’s Dance” success with albums that were critical flops.  “I suddenly felt very apart from my audience,” he told Live magazine in 1997. “And it was depressing, because I didn’t know what they wanted.”

Mr. Bowie regularly released albums through the 1980s and 1990s, although none approached the success of his previous output. But he continued to innovate, in 1996 becoming the first musician of his stature to release a song, “Telling Lies,” exclusively via the Internet. He caused a sensation when he was the first to sell asset-backed bonds, known in his case as “Bowie bonds” and acquired by Prudential, tied to the royalties on his back catalogue. 

By the eve of the century he had once aspired to create, Mr. Bowie seemed to be finally settling down. He fell in love — a condition his younger self had pooh-poohed — with the model Iman Abdulmaijd, whom he married in 1992 and with whom he had a daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, in 2000.  After suffering a heart attack backstage during a tour in 2004, he stopped producing albums or touring for nearly a decade, devoting himself to family life. He even got his vulpine teeth capped, to the disappointment of some fans.  But in 2013, the same year an elaborate retrospective of his visual legacy began touring the world, the 66-year-old Mr. Bowie released a new album, recorded in secret, called “The Next Day.” His first album in a decade, it was praised by critics, who called it innovative even as it hearkened back to his early music.

That Mr. Bowie was still reinventing himself in his seventh decade could not have surprised those who knew him. “David’s a real living Renaissance figure,” Roeg told Time magazine in 1983. “That’s what makes him spectacular. He goes away and re-emerges bigger than before. He doesn’t have a fashion, he’s just constantly expanding. It’s the world that has to stop occasionally and say, ‘My God, he’s still going on.’ ” 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/singer-david-bowie-dies-at-69-mesmerizing-performer-of-many-alter-egos/2016/01/11/e133f63c-b859-11e5-99f3-184bc379b12d_story.html

David Bowie Dies of Cancer at 69; He Transcended Music, Art and Fashion

(By Jon Pareles, New York Times, 11 January 2016)

David Bowie, the infinitely changeable, fiercely forward-looking songwriter who taught generations of musicians about the power of drama, images and personas, died on Sunday, two days after his 69th birthday.  Bowie’s death was confirmed by his publicist, Steve Martin, on Monday morning.  He died after having cancer for 18 months, according to a statement on Mr. Bowie’s social-media accounts.  “David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family,” a post on his Facebook page read.

His last album, “Blackstar,” a collaboration with a jazz quartet that was typically enigmatic and exploratory, was released on Friday — his birthday. He was to be honored with a concert at Carnegie Hall on March 31 featuring the Roots, Cyndi Lauper and the Mountain Goats.  He had also collaborated on an Off Broadway musical, “Lazarus,” that was a surreal sequel to his definitive 1976 film role, “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”

Mr. Bowie wrote songs, above all, about being an outsider: an alien, a misfit, a sexual adventurer, a faraway astronaut. His music was always a mutable blend: rock, cabaret, jazz and what he called “plastic soul,” but it was suffused with genuine soul. He also captured the drama and longing of everyday life, enough to give him No. 1 pop hits like “Let’s Dance.”  In concerts and videos, Mr. Bowie’s costumes and imagery traversed styles, eras and continents, from German Expressionism to commedia dell’arte to Japanese kimonos to space suits. He set an example, and a challenge, for every arena spectacle in his wake.  If he had an anthem, it was “Changes,” from his 1971 album “Hunky Dory,” which proclaimed: “Turn and face the strange / Ch-ch-changes / Oh look out now you rock and rollers / Pretty soon now you’re gonna get older.”

Mr. Bowie earned admiration and emulation across the musical spectrum — from rockers, balladeers, punks, hip-hop acts, creators of pop spectacles and even classical composers like Philip Glass, who based two symphonies on Mr. Bowie’s albums “Low” and “ ‘Heroes.’ ”  Mr. Bowie’s constantly morphing persona was a touchstone for performers like Madonna and Lady Gaga; his determination to stay contemporary introduced his fans to Philadelphia funk, Japanese fashion, German electronica and drum-and-bass dance music.  Nirvana chose to sing “The Man Who Sold the World,” the title song of Mr. Bowie’s 1970 album, in its brief set for the 1993 “MTV Unplugged in New York.” “Under Pressure,” a collaboration with the glam-rock group Queen, supplied a bass line for the 1990 Vanilla Ice hit “Ice Ice Baby.”  Yet throughout Mr. Bowie’s metamorphoses, he was always recognizable. His voice was widely imitated but always his own; his message was that there was always empathy beyond difference. 

Angst and apocalypse, media and paranoia, distance and yearning were among Mr. Bowie’s lifelong themes. So was a penchant for transgression coupled with a determination to push cult tastes toward the mainstream. Mr. Bowie produced albums and wrote songs for some of his idols — Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople — that gave them pop hits without causing them to abandon their individuality. And he collaborated with musicians like Brian Eno in the Berlin years and, in his final recordings, with the jazz musicians Maria Schneider and Donny McCaslin, introducing them to many new listeners. 

(MESSAGE FROM IGGY: "David’s friendship was the light of my life. I never met such a brilliant person. He was the best there is. - Iggy Pop (@IggyPop)” Jan. 11, 2016 )

Mr. Bowie was a person of relentless reinvention. He emerged in the late 1960s with the voice of a rock belter but with the sensibility of a cabaret singer, steeped in the dynamics of stage musicals. He was Major Tom, the lost astronaut in his career-making 1969 hit “Space Oddity.”  He was Ziggy Stardust, the otherworldly pop star at the center of his 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.”  He was the self-destructive Thin White Duke and the minimalist but heartfelt voice of the three albums he recorded in Berlin in the ’70s.  The arrival of MTV in the 1980s was the perfect complement to Mr. Bowie’s sense of theatricality and fashion. “Ashes to Ashes,” the “Space Oddity” sequel that revealed, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie,” and “Let’s Dance,” which offered, “Put on your red shoes and dance the blues,” gave him worldwide popularity.

Mr. Bowie was his generation’s standard-bearer for rock as theater: something constructed and inflated yet sincere in its artifice, saying more than naturalism could. With a voice that dipped down to baritone and leapt into falsetto, he was complexly androgynous, an explorer of human impulses that could not be quantified.  He also pushed the limits of “Fashion” and “Fame,” writing songs with those titles and also thinking deeply about the possibilities and strictures of pop renown.

Mr. Bowie was married for more than 20 years to the international model Iman, with whom he had a daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones.  In a post on Twitter, Duncan Jones, the musician’s son from an earlier marriage, with Angela Bowie, said: “Very sorry and sad to say it’s true. I’ll be offline for a while. Love to all.”

David Robert Jones was born in London on Jan. 8, 1947, where as a youth he soaked up rock ’n’ roll. He took up the saxophone in the 1960s and started leading bands as a teenager, singing the blues in a succession of unsuccessful groups and singles. He suffered a blow in a teenage brawl that caused his left pupil to be permanently dilated.

In the late 1960s, Lindsay Kemp, a dancer, actor and mime, became a lasting influence on Mr. Bowie, focusing his interest in movement and artifice. Mr. Bowie’s music turned toward folk-rock and psychedelia. The release of “Space Oddity,” shortly before the Apollo 11 mission, gained him a British pop audience and, when it was rereleased in 1973 in the United States, an American one.  By then, with the albums “Hunky Dory,” “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars” and “Aladdin Sane,” Mr. Bowie had become a pioneer of glam rock and a major star in Britain, playing up an androgynous image. But he also had difficulties separating his onstage personas from real life and succumbed to drug problems, particularly cocaine use. In 1973, he abruptly announced his retirement — though it was the retirement of Ziggy Stardust, not of Mr. Bowie.

He moved to the United States in 1974 and made “Diamond Dogs,” which included the hit “Rebel Rebel.” In 1975, he turned toward funk with the album “Young Americans,” recorded primarily in Philadelphia with collaborators including a young Luther Vandross; John Lennon joined Mr. Bowie in writing and singing the hit “Fame.” Mr. Bowie’s 1976 album “Station to Station” yielded more hits, but drug problems were making Mr. Bowie increasingly unstable; in interviews, he made pro-fascist pronouncements he would soon disown.

For a far-reaching change of environment, and to get away from drugs, Mr. Bowie moved in 1976 to Switzerland and then to West Berlin, part of a divided city with a sound that fascinated him: the Krautrock of Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! and other groups. Mr. Bowie shared a Berlin apartment with Iggy Pop, and he helped produce and write songs for two Iggy Pop albums, “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life.” He also made what is usually called his Berlin trilogy — “Low,” “ ‘Heroes’ ” and “Lodger” — working with Mr. Eno and Mr. Bowie’s collaborator over decades, the producer Tony Visconti. They used electronics and experimental methods, like having musicians play unfamiliar instruments, yet songs like “ ‘Heroes’ ” conveyed romance against the bleakest odds.

As the 1980s began, Mr. Bowie turned to live theater, performing in multiple cities (including a Broadway run) in the demanding title role of “The Elephant Man.” Yet in that decade, he would also reach his peak as a mainstream pop musician — particularly with his 1983 album “Let’s Dance,” which he produced with Nile Rodgers of Chic; the Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan also performed on the album. But by 1989, Mr. Bowie was determined to change again; he recorded, without top billing, as a member of the rock band Tin Machine.

His experiments continued in the 1990s. In 1995, he reconnected with Mr. Eno on an album, “1. Outside,” — influenced by science fiction and film noir — that was intended to be the start of a trilogy. Mr. Bowie toured with Nine Inch Nails in an innovative concert that had his band and Nine Inch Nails merging partway through. Mr. Bowie’s 1997 album, “Earthling,” turned toward the era’s electronic dance music.

By the 21st century, Mr. Bowie was an elder statesman. He had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. In 2001, he sang “ ‘Heroes’ ” at the Concert for New York City after the Sept. 11 attacks. His last tour, after the release of his album “Reality,” ended when he had heart problems in 2004. But he continued to lend his imprimatur to newer bands like Arcade Fire, joining them onstage, and TV on the Radio, adding backup vocals in the studio.  In 2006, he performed three songs in public for what would be the final time, at the Keep a Child Alive Black Ball fund-raiser at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York.

His final albums were a glance back and a new excursion. “The Next Day,” released in 2013, returned to something like the glam-rock sound of his 1970s guitar bands, for new songs suffused with bitter thoughts of mortality. And “Blackstar,” released two days before his death, had him backed by a volatile jazz-based quartet, in songs that contemplated fame, spirituality, lust, death and, as always, startling transformations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/arts/music/david-bowie-dies-at-69.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Review: ‘Blackstar,’ David Bowie’s Emotive And Cryptic New Album

(By Jon Pareles, New York Times, 6 January 2016)

Instability and ambiguity are the only constants on David Bowie’s “Blackstar” (ISO/Columbia), the strange, daring, ultimately rewarding album he releases this week on his 69th birthday. It’s at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous and, above all, willful, refusing to cater to the expectations of radio stations or fans. The closest thing it offers as an explanation of its message is the title of its finale: “I Can’t Give Everything Away.”

Mr. Bowie’s 2013 album, “The Next Day,” ended a silence of 10 years between studio albums; it revisited his chunky 1970s guitar-band rock with a mood darkened by bitter awareness of mortality. “Blackstar,” stylized as ★, veers elsewhere. Mr. Bowie’s 2014 anthology “Nothing Has Changed” included a new song, “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” recorded with the Maria Schneider Orchestra, a modern-jazz big band. The quartet led by the saxophonist Donny McCaslin, a mainstay of Ms. Schneider’s orchestra, is Mr. Bowie’s studio band on “Blackstar,” and it jams its way into rock, funk and electronics from a jazz perspective. The group complicates the harmonies and fills the interstices of the songs with improvisation, often with Mr. McCaslin’s saxophone chasing Mr. Bowie’s voice. The closest thing to “Blackstar” among Mr. Bowie’s two dozen studio albums is “1. Outside,” from 1995, which featured the jazz pianist Mick Garson and also presented more enigmas than answers.

Each song on “Blackstar” is restless and mercurial. The 10-minute title track opens the album with wavering guitar and flute tones that refuse to settle on a single key. Mark Guiliana’s drumbeat, when it arrives, is a matter of sputtering off-beats and silences, while Mr. Bowie intones lyrics about “the day of execution.” Midway through, the song moves through an improvised limbo and coalesces into a different tune: a march with lyrics about a messianic “blackstar” who also declares “I’m not a popstar.” Eventually the two halves of the song merge, with the opening verses over the march beat, darkening the tone even further. The video clip shows candlelit rituals and, near the end, bloody crucifixions. (Mr. McCaslin told Rolling Stone that Mr. Bowie said the song is “about ISIS,” a disputed contention.)

Thoughts of death hover throughout “Blackstar.” In “Lazarus,” a slowly gathering dirge with jolts from Mr. Bowie on electric guitar, the narrator is “in heaven” with “scars that can’t be seen,” looking back on a profligate life. A remake of “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” with a hurtling rock beat and Ben Monder’s keening guitar replacing Ms. Schneider’s impressionistic big-band horn arrangement, leaves unclear whether it is a farewell or a murder confession.

Throughout “Blackstar,” Mr. Bowie stays more cantankerous than contemplative. “Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” slams out a boom-bap hip-hop beat while Mr. Bowie’s voice leaps through an odd-angled melody amid a swarm of overdubbed saxophones. Mr. Bowie delivers “Girl Loves Me” in an odd, yodeling cackle, with lyrics that, for reasons unknown, often slip into the Russian-rooted slang Nadsat, from “A Clockwork Orange.”

This album’s last two songs, “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” circle back toward a familiar Bowie approach: the richly melodic, slow-building mid-tempo rocker. “Dollar Days” even allows itself some lush strings. But Mr. Bowie isn’t suddenly going cozy. In “Dollar Days,” he croons, “I’m dying to/Push their backs against the grain/And fool them all again and again.” He may be briefly dropping his mask; he may be trying on a new one. Either way, he’s not letting himself or his listeners take things easy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/arts/music/review-blackstar-david-bowies-emotive-and-cryptic-new-album.html

Postscript: David Bowie, 1947-2016

(By Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 11 January 2016)

This was not supposed to happen. Ever. Because he had been so many people over the course of his grand and immense career, it was inconceivable that he wouldn’t continue to be many people—a myriad of folks in a beautiful body who would reflect times to come, times none of us could imagine but that he could. He always got to the unknown first.

David Robert Jones was born, in Brixton, to working-class parents, on January 8, 1947, and the Brixton of his day was a changing place—home to members of the “Windrush generation,” West Indians who, like immigrants everywhere, had come to England looking for a better way. And the music those islanders bought to their new island no doubt influenced the artist who always wanted to be an artist; indeed, Bowie’s need to perform—to be recognized as different—made itself known when he was a child. In movement class, he claimed center stage, striking attitudes that his instructors found unusual, original. He was always an original, not least because he defied “Englishness”—not making a fuss, not standing out—by making theatre out of his body and that incredible face.

Everyone knows the story.  Jones—who did not shrink from a fight—was arguing with a friend over a girl when his friend punched him in one of his blue eyes; somehow, his fingernail got caught in Bowie’s left eye. The result was a permanently dilated pupil. Just as Marlon Brando broke his nose while horsing around backstage during the Broadway run of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and the accident added to, rather than detracted from, his beauty, Bowie’s infirmity only added to his allure, an “oddity” whose romanticism imagined other places in addition to this world—places he invented and filled with longing.

A natural collaborator, Bowie used his considerable fame to help popularize artists who would have had less of a chance without him. Nothing’s better than watching Bowie play keyboards for Dinah Shore on her TV show in 1977. He was there to support an artist he loved—Iggy Pop, whose seminal, first solo album, “The Idiot,” had come out that year. In an interview on MTV, recorded in 1990, Pop talked about how Bowie had rescued him, basically, from being a street person, and helped him to become an artist. On the Shore show, Pop’s outrageous body gyrates, twists, and turns as he sings “Sister Midnight”; at one point you can hear Bowie laughing at all the antics. Bowie then sits down with Shore, she of genteel nineteen-forties movie musicals, and attempts to explain, with great seriousness and in depth, why Pop was important, and why their collaboration worked.

Rock stars are not generally known for their generosity to other artists; it takes a lot to get up there and be such a huge presence. Early on, Bowie realized he was more himself—had more of himself—when he built bridges between different worlds. I wonder how much of that he owed to what he saw in Brixton. Two years before he worked with Pop, Bowie made his first masterpiece—1975’s “Young Americans.” Bowie called it “plastic soul,” which was an honest thought. Bowie was not a soul man; he was borrowing from soul artists—the guys who made the sound of Philadelphia just that—in order to make his new self, backed by incredible black artists like Ava Cherry and Luther Vandross. Dressed in high-waisted pants and carrying a cane, Bowie’s elegance and showmanship on “The Dick Cavett Show,” in 1974, while he was getting his plastic-soul thing together, didn’t so much diminish the rather square-looking Cavett as inject a powerful social formula: what blackness looked like on a white artist.

Bowie was a miscegenationist at a time when it wasn’t necessarily cool, or tolerated. Bowie was “queer” in that way, and things only got queerer on the Cavett show when Bowie introduced Cherry, his lover at the time, to the audience. There, again, he was framing a performer he liked by conferring some of his star power on her. (Bowie worked on Cherry’s album “People from Bad Homes.” Check it out. Her sound is not as big as Betty Davis’s, but there are loads of wonderful moments on it, including the lead track, written by Bowie.) Halfway through “Foot Stompin’,” on the Cavett show, Bowie points to Cherry, the blond-haired black woman to his left, and says, “Cherry!” She dances a bit, and the moment is gone, but not the memory of Bowie watching his friend perform in the aura of his generosity.

Indeed, Bowie’s rendition of “Foot Stompin’ ” was the artist’s tribute to the Flares, a doo-wop group that recorded in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties. Back then, a young David Robert Jones thrilled to the records his father brought home, including those made by that outrageous, vulnerable showman Little Richard. When he heard “Tutti Frutti,” Bowie said once, he knew he’d heard God. Little Richard’s uncommon look and feeling were part of what he meant to project in this common world. Bowie, too. He was an Englishman who was sometimes afraid of Americans and fame but, on his final record, could sing “Look at me / I’m in heaven” as a way of describing where he wanted to end up, maybe, but definitely where Bowie—that outsider who made different kids feel like dancing in that difference, and who had a genius for friendship, too—had lived since we knew him.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/postscript-david-bowie-1947-2016?mbid=nl_160111_Daily&CNDID=31031903&spMailingID=8420420&spUserID=MTAzNjIxMDAzNzQ2S0&spJobID=841224512&spReportId=ODQxMjI0NTEyS0

‪The Beautiful Meaninglessness of David Bowie

(By Ben Greenman, The New Yorker, 09 January 2016)

David Bowie’s “Blackstar,” recently released, is his second album since he resurfaced from what seemed like semi-retirement. As it turned out, it was a period of rejuvenation. “The Next Day,” released at the beginning of 2013, was a muscular rock record filled with snarling anthems and reflective ballads, and it acknowledged its connection to (or hostility toward) the past with its cover art, which featured an obscured image of the cover art of Bowie’s 1977 album “Heroes.”

“Blackstar” is a different creature entirely. Where “The Next Day” was, in keeping with contemporary trends in album creation, long and somewhat exhausting (it clocked in at fourteen tracks and fifty-three minutes, a full quarter hour longer than most of Bowie’s seventies albums, and deluxe editions were even more bloated), “Blackstar” goes by fast, seven tracks in forty minutes or so—and a full quarter of that running time is devoted to the opener, the spooky, multipart title track. It’s also musically distinct. Rather than assembling a crack team of rock vets (and Bowie vets) like Tony Visconti, Earl Slick, and Gail Ann Dorsey, “Blackstar” employs a new band anchored by New York jazz players like the pianist Jason Lindner and the saxophonist Donny McCaslin.

The presence of jazz players has led to a mistaken characterization of “Blackstar” as a jazz record, which it isn’t. It’s a singer-songwriter record that is willing to stretch its compositions around instrumentation that’s not typically associated with rock and roll. If the sonic palette of “Blackstar” carves out a space around the record, the imagery for the album, which so far includes the iconic cover design and two excellent videos (the film accompanying the title song features a terrifying version of a Bowie whose eyes are buttons glued to the outside of a head bandage), has been equally powerful and provocative. But the main way in which “Blackstar” is prime Bowie is in its willingness to embrace nonsense.

From the beginning, Bowie showed an interest in exploring the fragmentation of identity and meaning. His career depended heavily on performance, which allowed him to actively deploy various signifiers inside and alongside his music—signifiers of gender, of sexual orientation, even of humanity itself. (The question of radical others, up to and including aliens, surface frequently in his early work.) At some point, he began to look more rigorously into the idea of meaninglessness, and to write songs that were willful participants in their own fragmentation. The most famous early example of this, of course, is the “Diamond Dogs” album, in which Bowie employed the cut-up method developed by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Scissors were taken to a text. Slips of paper were drawn at random. The results, subject to chance, were then fashioned into lyrics like these:

Meet his little hussy with his ghost-town approach

Her face is sans feature, but she wears a Dali brooch
Sweetly reminiscent, something mother used to bake
Wrecked up and paralyzed, Diamond Dogs are stabilized

It was rare for Bowie to embrace clear meaning. The title of one of his most plainspoken songs, “ ‘Heroes,’ ” is suspended in a second set of quotation marks, largely to disrupt any straightforward interpretation. “Where Are We Now?,” Bowie’s beautifully fragile comeback ballad and the first single from “The Next Day,” was a conspicuous exception—it was a snapshot, relatively easy to parse, of an older man revisiting Berlin and wondering about the city’s ch-ch-changes. But on much of the rest of the album he was as slippery as ever, and the same is true of “Blackstar.” The new album’s title track and lead single opens with a ghostly, vaguely Middle Eastern chant.

In the villa of Ormen, in the villa of Ormen
Stands a solitary candle, ah-ah, ah-ah
In the center of it all, in the center of it all
Your eyes
On the day of execution, on the day of execution
Only women kneel and smile, ah-ah, ah-ah
At the center of it all, at the center of it all
Your eyes, your eyes

People said it was about ISIS, and then Bowie denied it. It’s good that he denied it, because his songs should be about nothing, which in turn allows them to be about everything. In another song, “Girl Loves Me,” Bowie latches onto a rubbery melody and the echoed, repeated refrain: “Where the fuck did Monday go?” It’s evocative, but unexplained. Adding to the song’s sense of obfuscation and evasion is the fact that many of the lyrics are in Nadsat, the language Anthony Burgess invented for his teen hooligans in “A Clockwork Orange.” There’s also some Polari thrown in for good measure.

Cheena so sound, so titty up this Malchick, say
Party up moodge, ninety vellocet round on Tuesday
Real bad dizzy snatch making all the homies mad, Thursday
Popo blind to the polly in the hole by Friday

The lyrics don’t need to be straightforwardly interpreted for them to communicate a compelling sense of erotic menace. More to the point: it’s the way in which they thwart straightforward interpretation that grants them their power. The British writer and intellectual historian Peter Watson has made a career of publishing books that set out to comprehensively summarize the field of human thought: most notably with “Ideas,” in 2009. His books are filled with reductions and lacunae, as any book purporting to summarize human thought must be. But they are also immensely useful for picking out kernels. In “The Modern Mind,” in 2001, Watson gives an account of the growth of Surrealism in art, identifying the movement not only as a form of exploration but as a site of resistance:

But above all, taking their lead from dreams and the unconscious, their work showed a deliberate rejection of reason. Their art sought to show that progress, if it were possible, was never a straight line, that nothing was predictable, and that the alternative to the banalities of the acquisitive society, now that religion was failing, was a new form of enchantment.

Rock and roll started as a form of enchantment and has become, in large part, another symptom of the banality of our acquisitive society. By persisting in deliberately rejecting reason, Bowie reminds us that there are plenty of reasons to do so. The most naked moment on the new record is its final song, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” which almost reads like a defense of a career of obscurantism.

I know something is very wrong
The post returns for prodigal songs
With blackout harks with flowered muse
With skull designs upon my shoes
I can’t give everything
I can’t give everything
Away

Seeing more and feeling less

Saying no but meaning yes
This is all I ever meant
That’s the message that I sent
I can’t give everything
I can’t give everything
Away

‪Unless, of course, that isn’t what it means at all.

Postscript: David Bowie’s death is sad and surprising, though maybe just partly surprising. There were many rumors of illness even before the release of his 2013 album “The Next Day,” but the vitality of that record beat them back a bit. In the videos for “Blackstar,” Bowie looks frail, but he often looked frail. The news of his cancer and its advance seems to have been kept close, limited to family, physicians, and a few friends. People will now look for hints in his recent music, and they’ll find them. “The Next Day” is filled with a sense of loneliness and the struggle to connect, and “Blackstar” has several songs that seem to bridge life and death. “Lazarus,” the song that everyone wants to see as a literal handling of the matter, was written for an Off Broadway play that updates the character of Thomas Jerome Newton, the man who fell to Earth. That doesn’t mean that the song is not a way of facing into death, but it also doesn’t mean that it is. For me the album’s contribution to the vexing question of human existence lies in the way in Bowie struggles to articulate the human struggle to articulate. That seemed true even before Bowie’s death, and it seems truer now. It brings to mind Samuel Beckett’s last poem, “What Is the Word,” which Beckett wrote in bed in a nursing home, in Paris, the year before his death. Except that he didn’t really write it at all: it’s a translation of an earlier work, “Comment Dire,” that he wrote in French in 1982. The inexpressible is expressed twice, one the echo of the other, emptiness mirroring emptiness.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/%e2%80%aathe-beautiful-meaninglessness-of-david-bowie

Credit Illustration by Jim Blanchard

Labyrinth: The Path That Leads From David Bowie To Us.

(By Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker, 18 March 2013)

“The Next Day,” David Bowie’s twenty-sixth studio album, has been awaited with such anticipation that “anticipation” feels like too weak a word, better suited to the release of a sneaker. In 2004, Bowie had a heart attack, and he was recently rumored to be in poor health. Leading up to the release of “The Next Day,” a jittery cathexis formed. Do we judge Bowie as we always have, by his own standards? Would a new album be received reverentially, like those of the post-motorcycle-crash Bob Dylan?  The sense of both expectation and need in the press—the phrase “greatest comeback in rock-and-roll history” has been cited repeatedly—speaks to the energy invested in a sixty-six-year-old pop star. People care, and remain curious, but only rarely do they hope for so much.

Fascination with the album has been compounded by a rare coup. “The Next Day” was made in secrecy during the past two years, largely in lower Manhattan, with the producer Tony Visconti, Bowie’s frequent collaborator, and veteran musicians with whom he’s worked before. One track, “Where Are We Now?,” was released in early January, without warning, an act that served as the album’s announcement. Such a display of privacy is almost performance art these days, though Bowie seems motivated not by paranoid seclusion but simply by the desire to work without unwanted feedback. He has made it clear that he won’t tour for “The Next Day,” beyond perhaps a single show, and he also won’t be attending the opening of the retrospective of his career at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. But he has demurred before, after “Lodger” (1979) and “Scary Monsters” (1980), and eventually, after a few years, he got back to working much as he had previously.

The current level of interest in Bowie reflects a larger theme in pop-music culture. While the long view of musical history suggests the obvious—that the greats remain great while a few fade out—in the near term, some acts seize the imagination of the moment. The Beatles have a flawless catalogue, but their aesthetic has left them on the outside for now: cartoons, granny glasses, and French horns don’t fit into 2013. Conversely, the ennui of present versions of punk and disco and rap—rooted in a young adult’s curt dismissal rather than a child’s open acceptance—has reinforced a common taste for darker acts such as Bowie. We no longer believe that all you need is love (or embroidered bell-bottoms), but we do believe in androgyny and world-weary dance parties buoyed by cocaine and artificially sour exchanges that mask a deep romantic streak. Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke of “Station to Station,” one of Bowie’s best albums, were always coming on aloof and imperious, then begging you to stay. His catalogue, though not as fault-free as that of the Beatles, or even that of Led Zeppelin, provides grist for today’s music-making cohort. Bowie has lasted, and he has found a place in the twenty-first century as an idea and a musician and a series of haircuts.

But does “The Next Day,” which revolves around references to death and to Bowie’s own work, complete that transition? It succeeds because none of the self-reflection results in pastiche or sentimentality; the problem is that the production that Bowie and Visconti chose for the songs puts this record, sonically, closer to the blocky drums and sports-bar guitars of eighties albums like “Let’s Dance” and “Tonight” than to some of his slightly hidden gems from the past two decades. The magnificent “Heathen,” from 2002, an album with fewer good songs than “The Next Day,” was a more cohesive marriage of electronic textures and traditional guitar work, and Bowie was in robust voice. Bowie and Visconti worked on that together, and it’s difficult to understand how they could have been so in synch with the moment then but not now.

“The Next Day” uses sounds that are several decades old, particularly reverb settings and synthesizers that even a musical illiterate will identify as sounding “eighties.” Regardless of whether these markers are intentional, it’s clear that Bowie does want you to think about time: specifically, the time that David Jones (his birth name) has spent being David Bowie. The art work for “The Next Day” is a replica of the cover of “Heroes,” from 1977, tweaked so that a white square obscures Bowie’s face and the title of the old album is crossed out. Other references snake through songs. The peppy Motown beat of “Dancing in Outer Space” is more or less that of “Modern Love,” from “Let’s Dance”; “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” fades out with the drumbeat of “Five Years,” from “Ziggy Stardust.”

The single “Where Are We Now?” is one of the album’s most emotionally direct songs, and it carefully melts down elements from “Heroes” without being too obvious. It is slow and elegiac but doesn’t drag—a few arpeggiated guitar chords ring for the length of entire measures, along with sustained piano chords and an understated drumbeat. Bowie’s voice, which is placed high in the mix, is only slightly diminished by age. There is a striation in his mighty sound, the streaks of time passing, hardly disabling but impossible to miss.

The song’s lyrics start with a plaint that could also be a joke: “Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz. You never knew that, that I could do that. Just walking the dead.” Does this refer to his own frailty—that one might not think he could travel alone—or is it a reference to the divided Berlin of “Heroes,” a suggestion that he can go back to that time without harming himself emotionally or artistically? The chorus is simply the title of the song, repeated, pained but not pathetic. This all sets up a final build, a devastating, slow, and deliberate accretion. The drums switch to a heavy tattoo without speeding up. Some phrases repeat twice, some come only once: “As long as there’s sun, as long as there’s rain, as long as there’s fire, as long as there’s me, as long as there’s you.” Maybe we can be heroes, it seems to say, if only for five minutes.

“Where Are We Now?” is not only the album’s gentlest song; it is one of the few that push Bowie’s voice to the front and let us luxuriate in it. For much of the album, which tends toward a middling rock feel, his voice is buried in the center of the music. But one of the best songs, the trim and taut “I’d Rather Be High,” details a soldier’s troubles without the finger-wagging that can turn topical songs into lectures. The music is perky, a shuffling beat anchoring a twinkly, high guitar figure by Gerry Leonard. The opening lyrics could be about anybody “upon the beach,” gossiping till their “lips are bleeding,” though the chorus makes clear who is watching whom: “I’d rather be high, I’d rather be flying, I’d rather be dead or out of my head than training these guns on those men in the sand, I’d rather be high.” But the mood of the song isn’t especially dark, because Bowie and Visconti are able to couch the fear of a confused soldier inside an equally believable state of mind, one in which he’s thinking about “teen-age sex” and getting high, as well as not shooting at people he doesn’t know.

Production aside, these songs are strong enough that there hasn’t been a Bowie album this good in—well, the bar rats can fight it out. It’s not “Station to Station,” but it’s a fine rock record that is a few hairs away from being among his best. Even the obsessives should be able to accept that.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/18/labyrinth-3